Aubreyana Ethel was a two-month-old female infant from Phoenix, Arizona, whose race/ethnicity is listed in public homicide records as unknown. On February 23, 2015, Arizona’s Department of Child Safety received a report that she had been brought to a hospital with life-threatening injuries. Medical staff documented that she had no viable brain tissue, extensive retinal hemorrhaging, and up to nine healing rib fractures, a cluster of findings that indicated very severe and repeated trauma
rather than a single accidental event. Despite intensive medical care, the baby died from her injuries on February 26, 2015; later memorial records list her death in Phoenix in early 2015, with her remains reported as cremated.
The child-welfare investigation that followed focused on what had happened in the home in the days and weeks before the emergency call. According to the DCS fatality preliminary and summary reports, the agency examined the history and circumstances surrounding the child’s care and concluded that the pattern of injuries could not be reconciled with a benign explanation. In those reports, DCS states that it determined the baby’s parents, Andre Ethel and Adrianna Price, had either directly abused her and/or failed to protect her from abuse by another caregiver, and that the maltreatment allegations regarding each parent were formally substantiated in the dependency case. As a result of those findings, DCS removed the child’s siblings from the household and filed a dependency petition in Maricopa County Juvenile Court, while arranging ongoing services and oversight for the family.
Public crime-tracking and cold-case aggregation sites that draw on Phoenix-area homicide data list the case under the child’s name, noting Phoenix as the city, describing the cause of death broadly as “murder” or “death by force,” and flagging it as a child homicide associated with the Phoenix Police Department. These third-party databases confirm that law enforcement regarded her death as the result of criminal violence, but they do not provide narrative details about how the injuries were inflicted or who, if anyone, was ultimately prosecuted.
With respect to arrests, suspects, or criminal charges, the material available online is notably limited. The DCS documents and the homicide-registry summaries consistently identify the parents as the caregivers held responsible in the child-protection process—DCS explicitly found that each parent either abused the baby or failed to protect her and took civil action in juvenile court on that basis—but those same sources do not mention any parallel criminal charges. Separate searches of publicly accessible news reports, court summaries, and arrest databases do not reveal clear records of a homicide or child-abuse prosecution tied to this fatality under either parent’s name. Given the absence of such documentation, it is not possible from currently available online sources to state that anyone was arrested or criminally convicted in direct connection with her death; what can be said is that the child-welfare authorities formally substantiated maltreatment by the parents and removed the remaining children from their care while the case was handled in the dependency system.
